Edgar Mitchell and Roswell

Over the last couple of days, there has been a lot of talk about what Dr. Edgar Mitchell apparently told an audience in Great Britain. In some versions, these stories seemed to suggest that Mitchell had some sort of communication with alien creatures while on the moon, and said that there was, indeed, a cover-up.

On Friday, July 25, Mitchell had the opportunity to clear up some of these misconceptions when he appeared on BlogTalkRadio’s ShapeShifting, hosted by Lisa Bonnice. He did say there was a cover up at Roswell, but also suggested that NASA knew nothing about it, or rather he had no information to suggest that NASA knew about it.

In response to one of Bonnice’s questions about Roswell, Mitchell said:

I was talking about the Roswell incident, the Roswell visitation primarily, but there have been many others that have been reported that I have no personal awareness of but that was the one that I was really talking about... and my information comes from what I call "the old timers," because I grew up in the Roswell area and when I went to the moon, some of the old timers from that period, some locals, and others military and intelligence people, who were under rather severe oaths to not reveal any of this and kind of wanted to get their conscience clear and off their chests before they passed on, selected me and said, independently - this wasn't a group effort - independently that maybe I might be a safe person to tell their story to. And all of them confirmed, and what I'm saying is they confirmed the Roswell incident was a real incident and they in some way had some part in it that they wanted to talk about.

Mitchell continued by saying:

Well, that the crash of an alien spacecraft in the Roswell area was a real event and much of the lore, I can't say all of the lore, but much of the fact that dead bodies were recovered and live ones were recovered, that they were not of this world, was the story. And of course it was reported in the Roswell Daily Record one day and promptly denied the next day and a cover story of a weather balloon, and that was pure nonsense. That was a cover-up.

Later, Mitchell told Irene Klotz from the Discovery Channel:

Subsequent to that, I did take my story to the Pentagon - not NASA, but the Pentagon - and asked for a meeting with the Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and got it. And told them my story and what I know and eventually had that confirmed by the admiral that I spoke with, that indeed what I was saying was true.

The whole interview can be seen is at:

http://dsc.discovery.com/space/qa/alien-ufo-edgar-mitchell.html

And then, echoing the story related by Barry Goldwater and his attempts to see the crash material, the admiral told Mitchell:

...There was a UFO crash. There was an alien spacecraft. This gentleman [the admiral] tried his damndest to get me in and like so many others in the administration over the last 60 years, since JFK's time, was unable to. He was told 'Admiral, you don't have a need to know, and therefore go get lost,' essentially.

Let’s take a look at this carefully. Mitchell isn’t saying that he saw any of this, that he was working with inside information, but was talking to the people who were involved, in Roswell. Clearly these were people he trusted and that they felt they could tell him about it because of who he was. But this adds little to what we already know about Roswell. He provides no names, though I suspect we could identify some of them if we wanted.He then goes off on what I believe to be a tangent, but it also supplies us with a clue about the source of some of the information.

He said:

Here the Air Force is charged with presumably protecting the skies and the advanced technologies of our nation and the intelligence services didn't really know what to do with an alien spacecraft and didn't know whether they were hostile or otherwise, and didn't want the Soviets to get involved with that, or know about it, so the easiest thing to do was lie about it, cover it up and have it classified and deny that it happened. And that's what has happened and unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I don't know, that President Truman then elected a committee of very high level military and civilian academicians and people and formed the Military and Joint Intelligence Committee.

This is the same sort of thing that Brigadier General Arthur Exon had told me a number of years ago. Exon said that he didn’t know the name of the committee, only that he knew some of the people involved and that he had information about some of the others. Exon provided names, such as Stuart Symington (seen here), who in July 1947, was the Under Secretary of War for Air, General Carl Spaatz, who was the commander of Army Air Forces, and he even suggests that Dwight Eisenhower, who was the Chief of Staff of the Army in 1947, was part of the committee.

Exon told me, "I just know there was a top intelligence echelon represented and the President’s office was represented and the Secretary of Defense [here meaning the Secretary of War] was represented and these people stayed on in key positions even through they might have moved out [meaning changed jobs such as Eisenhower becoming president and Symington eventually becoming a senator]."

Mitchell then identifies what he believed to be the committee. He said:

Abbreviated MAJIC or "Majic 12," that's what it was called, and gave them power to manage this so-called alien presence or crash or whatever they were going to do. And they passed a very secretive bill that gave authority, perhaps too much authority, and over the last 60 years since that incident, things have been continuously covered up, lied about, hidden, and people have not been able to get in to that - including Barry Goldwater when he was a presidential candidate - tried to crack into it and get the information out and was denied. President Ford later tried to get some information out and was denied.

This is where we enter into speculation by Mitchell. Both Mitchell and Exon suggested that a committee was created to investigate and to exploit the finds at Roswell. Exon called it the "Unholy Thirteen" simply because he had no other name for it, and that was the name he used when discussing it. Bill Moore, Richard Doty, and others received documents suggesting it was known as the Majestic-Twelve, or MJ-12, code named MAJIC.

At this point it doesn’t really matter who is right about the name of the committee, or even the exact nature of it. What is important is that we have two very highly placed people who were talking about an oversight committee that was investigating Roswell and setting policy about UFOs. We have the names of some of those people who appear on both lists. Exon, for example, said that Roscoe Hillenkoetter (seen here) was on, as was James Forrestal who became the first Secretary of Defense in 1947.

Now we have further corroboration of this committee and while we, inside the UFO community argue about who is right about it, the real story goes relatively unreported. First, we had an Air Force brigadier general, who was in the right place at the right time to know, tell us about this committee.

Now we have a former astronaut tell us about this committee and if he wants to call it the Majic 12, then so be it. But the important point is that we have another man who should be in a place to know. We should be looking for the committee rather than arguing among ourselves about who is right about this and who is wrong. Maybe the MJ-12 documents are fraudulent, or maybe not, but that really isn’t the point. The point is that there was, and is, a committee controlling this information and we should be searching for that.

When we look back into the history of UFOs, we see a couple of things. First, prior to July 8, 1947, the government and especially the military, didn’t care about all the stories of flying saucers. The newspapers are full of speculation, reports, eyewitness accounts, and columns attempting to explain what is going on.

Then, on July 9, the day after the story breaks in Roswell, we see newspaper articles saying that the Army and Navy moved today to suppress stories of the flying saucers whizzing through the atmosphere. This was a wire story and I have found it, and variations of it, in many newspapers. Why, suddenly, on July 9 does the Army and Navy care about these stories? I will note that many newspapers stopped reporting them.

Edward Ruppelt (seen here), who was, at one time the chief of Project Blue Book wrote in his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, wrote, "The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their associations with the government, had complete access to our files. And these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyes fanatics, they were scientists - rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence experts..."

So, rather than trying to prove the name MJ-12 is correct, we should be combining forces to find out all we can about the oversight committee. Searches in the past have been limited to the men whose names appear on the MJ-12 document. Maybe we should expand it to include those mentioned by Exon. Maybe we’ll find something there.

For now, we have Edgar Mitchell clearly on the record talking about the Roswell UFO crash based on his conversations with the people of Roswell he personally knew, talking about the oversight committee which he labeled MJ-12, and talking about the continuing government cover up about UFOs. We have an Air Force general telling us some of the same things. Isn’t it about time we began to take some of this a little more seriously and work together to unravel this rather than worry about who is right and who is wrong?